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Phil Remington 1921-2013

February 9, 2013

Remington in his modified roadster on the dry lakes of Southern California.

Phil Remington, fabricator, designer, engineer, known popularly as “Mr. Fix It” throughout a racing career that spanned almost every generation and genre of American motorsports, died Feb. 8 at age 92.

Remington's involvement in motorsports started on the dry lakes of Southern California before WWII where he raced a modified roadster so cool that modern day fabricator/artist Dan Webb re-created it in full and showed it at SEMA recently. Remington spent WWII as a flight engineer in the South Pacific then returned to the Southern California hot rod and racing scene full time. He would have been a racer but a motorcycle accident that nearly cost him a leg convinced him to shift his talents to building race cars instead of driving them, though he kept a photo of his lakes car on his wall throughout his life.

Remington worked on some of the most memorable programs in American motorsports, from Lance Reventlow's grand prix and sports car programs to Carroll Shelby's Cobra and Le Mans GT40 efforts.

During an interview last year, Shelby recalled his early race teams' success at Le Mans.

“What we did was take a bunch of California hot-rodders and we whipped Ferrari's ass,” as he put it. “The Cobra was the most archaic chassis, probably, with its two buggy springs and a pushrod engine, to ever go over there and win a world championship. But the reason that it was so successful was because of people like Phil Remington…”

The last half of his life -- a remarkable 45 years -- Remington spent working at Dan Gurney's All American Racers, designing, building and fixing parts and pieces of race cars up until just a month before he died. Word is he never missed a day of work at AAR.

Mark Vaughn
- After slumming in Europe five years covering F1 etc. Mark Vaughn interviewed with Autoweek at the 1989 Frankfurt motor show has been with us ever since because no one else will take him. Anyone?
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